Avoiding a Desaturated Life

There really isn’t much color most of the places you go to. What color you do find usually isn’t well placed or interesting and you often have to search for it. Or it’s muted and not very vibrant. You might be able to see more color when you’re downtown but that’s because people are trying to sell you something so they try to shock your senses and get you to say wow, that stands out so I should buy it. But in the suburbs you just don’t find any people willing to do more than a red plastic bird feeder or a yellow “Pesticides have been applied to the lawn” stake.

I noticed on my walk today that most of the world around is made up primarily of neutral colors. The houses are whites, gray, and browns. The majority of cars on the road seem white, black or gray. When you do see a lot of colors all in one place they tend to look ugly because people haven’t thought about complimentary colors or how the colors are composed together.

Maybe that’s why so many people are into over saturating their photos on Instagram or doing HDR photography on Flickr. They want to pull out what little color they can find and show it to the world.

Now, I do have to admit, today was a cloudy, rainy day in my part of the world. And, it’s still winter so things probably seem more muted and dull to me. Thankfully, Spring is just around the corner and life is starting to spring up around us now that the weather is warming slightly. But right now, you really have to work at it to see it. Here’s a street corner I passed by the other day:

It would have been very easy to just pass by this scene and disregard it. But I stopped because I knew that in most places, if you come in just a little closer you can find some pretty amazing things. Sure enough, as I got down to ground level I was able to discover this: